By acclamation the Art Institute of Chicago is already one of the great museums of the world, but earlier this month it laid hands on a work that its director called a “transformative acquisition.” The work is by the absurdist painter-provocateur-conman Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). The New York Times puts the price tag at $12 million, maybe more. That’s a lot of transformation.
The museum’s deputy director could scarcely contain her excitement. The work, she said, is a “crux” in the history of modernism. “It’s a pivotal point, it’s a rupture . . . it’s an icon.” It’s a bottle rack is what it is, a homey appliance used by the French to dry bottles after cleaning. Not so long ago you could find one in any Parisian department store. Indeed, that’s where Duchamp, in 1914, found the objet d’art titled “Bottle Rack,” which is, as we’ve explained, a bottle rack. A $12 million bottle rack.
Duchamp called such mass-manufactured household objects “readymades.” He plucked the readymades from their everyday uses, put his signature to them, and displayed them as works of art. His other readymades include a snow shovel, a chimney ventilator, a dog comb, and—most sublime, most famous of all!—a urinal, which he titled “Fountain.” By presenting readymades as art, say art critics and historians, Duchamp subverted the very notion of “art,” thereby raising in the minds of deep thinkers the pointless question of whether “art” even exists at all. It is a rabbit hole from which art critics—and artists, for that matter—have not escaped for decades.
You can never tell with Duchamp, who was (let us say) a very unusual man, but it seems likely his readymades contained a healthy dose of satire, a way of sending up the stuffed-shirt curators, critics, and gallery owners of his own day. One of Duchamp’s friends summed up the master’s thinking like this: “When [he] discovered the ready-mades [he] sought to discourage aesthetics. . . . [He] threw the bottle-rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.”
There is a word for a person who falls for stunts like this: chump. In Chicago we could call them Duchumps. No arts administrator today wants to be thought of as a stuffed shirt, of course. If anything, since Duchamp’s time, the competition is to see who can most thoroughly lay waste to what remains of definable artistic standards. It cost them $12 million, but the Duchumps at the Art Institute have won this race hands down.
